Stocks Close At New Record High On Russian Invasion, GDP Decline And Pending Home Sales Miss

With the Ukraine now openly appealing to the world to halt what in its own words is a Russian invasion, it only made sense that after the bigger than expected downward revision to Q4 GDP, and the miss in Pending Home Sales, that the S&P would close at a new all time high. Oh, there was that surge in the Chicago PMI which confirmed that the February weakness across all other data was not due to the weather, and which is all that the market decided to focus on.

And so once again, the fact that it was 3:30 pm at the end of the day – easily the most "fundamental" driver of stock valuation in the past five 5 years – overruled all bad news, or is it good news? It is confusing what the catalyst for stock surges any more is – is bad good news great, or is good news greater – aside from the Fed's relentless growing balance sheet of course.

We are at a loss what else to highlight here: maybe the fact that despite the sheer euphoric idiocy the Nasdaq did finally closer lower.

All one can do at this point is sit back and laugh at the complete abortion that Ben Bernanke's, and now Janet Yellen's centrally-planned "market" has become.